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Problems With Deming Cycle

The Deming Cycle's application was intended for quality control purposes and proposed continuous improvement in quality of products/experiments.[4] The simple cycle works well in this application, but it is debatable that it should be applied to major organizational improvement. ISO recognized the need to provide better guidance in this regard and published the ISO standard ISO 9004:2000, which replaced the use of the term continuous improvement with continual improvement. The change is not trivial, it recognizes that organizational quality system performance improvement requires significant effort and needs pauses to consolidate change (hence continual and not continuous improvement) (ISO 9004:2000).

The Deming Cycle has an inherent circular paradigm, it assumes that everything starts with Planning. Plan has a limited range of meaning. Shewart intended that experiments and quality control should be planned to deliver results in accordance with the specifications (see meaning above), which is good advice. However, Planning was not intended to cover aspects such as creativity, innovation, invention or Complex Adaptive Systems. In these aspects particularly when based upon imagination, it is often impossible or counterproductive to plan (see referenced Wikipedia pages for why this is so). Hence, PDCA is inapplicable in these situations.

The Deming Cycle approaches often do not get to the root cause of a problem, especially in adaptive situations which call for an experiential approach but demand much more rigour in analysis and data collection. An adaptive challenge exists where there are no visible solutions to problems, and can exist, for example in areas where chaos, uncertainty, and ambiguity exists, such as new frontiers, and existing complex systems such as Healthcare.

Do and Act have the same meaning in English. Dictionaries (Shorter Oxford) provide the following relevant definitions:

Do: verb 1 perform or carry out (an action), 2 achieve or complete (a specified target), 3 act or progress in a specified way, 4 work on (something) to bring it to a required state.
Act: verb 1 take action; do something, 2 take effect or have a particular effect, 3 behave in a specified way.

The 'Act' in the Deming Cycle is meant to be interpreted to have a different meaning to 'Do', otherwise it could be as easily have been PDCD or PACA. In PDCA, 'Act' is meant to apply actions to the outcome for necessary improvement (see meaning above), in other words 'Act' means 'Improve' (applying PDCA to itself could result in PDCI).